The episode that marks my one year anniversary on the air. The 20th show landmark! Live in the studio with Margo LaPierre.
Margo LaPierre has been coming over the season to Tree Reading Series open mics leading people like me to come up to her and say, who are you and where did you come from? That was an amazing poem. Her poems have an intensity and a dexterity with metaphor.
I am happy/sad that she has a book coming out. Happy because I’ll get to buy it from Guernica. Sad because it won’t be out for another couple years. (These days, the publishing cycle can be 2-3 years from manuscript to binding.)
It’s called Braille Tattoo. All of the poems she’s read at the Tree Reading Series have come from this manuscript. That book is described as:
What happens when we believe in something that isn’t there? What happens when we believe in our unpublished poems? What happens to the mind maps of spaces we don’t live in anymore? What happens when we doubt our own history? We cling to the solidity of physical space. Our abstracted sense of being swells to its limits, presses against its boundary of skin, bumps up against the world, finds itself there. Braille Tattoo explores the idea that we as humans are undefined, chaotic, that we come to know ourselves through the spaces we inhabit. These are hungry poems that look feverishly outwards, fueled by animism, addiction, topophilia and human relationships.
She graduated from Ryerson University with a B.A. in Arts and Contemporary Studies and a major in Philosophy. She is a poet and visual artist. Her writing reflects a Canadian urban sensibility with a focus on the way language and physical space structure human experience. Her poetry has been published in Bywords Literary Quarterly, The Feathertale Review, The Antigonish Review, The Claremont Review and in EAT IT: A Literary Cookbook of Food, Sex and Feminism. Her first full-length book of poetry is forthcoming with Guernica Editions.
Also in the episode: 2 Things I’m Reading: Kevin McPherson Eckhoff’s ancestorge from Forge (Snare, 2013) and Nicholas Power’s untitled which was part of the John Newlove shortlist, now coming out of Melancholy Scientist, (Tekseditions, 2014)